Blogger's note: The Pentagon deliberately subverted American policy toward Syria, sabotaging US efforts to aid Syrian rebels and even sending US intelligence to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to journalist Seymour Hersh.
In a nearly 7,000-word piece in the London Review of Books, Hersh says that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's top military leaders, decided to deliberately subvert American foreign policy and form a secret alliance with Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a nearly 7,000-word piece in the London Review of Books, Hersh says that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's top military leaders, decided to deliberately subvert American foreign policy and form a secret alliance with Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Source: London Review of
Books Vol. 38 No. 1 · 7 January 2016
- 304
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military
Barack Obama’s repeated
insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are
‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years
provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most
senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on
what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally,
Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia
and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries
share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria;
like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.
The military’s resistance
dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put
together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad
regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi
extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the
Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing
on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim
view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm
the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for
more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and
goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into
Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment
to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was
started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels
fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an
across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the
opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called
moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at
an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’
opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.
Lieutenant General
Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his
agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian
leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he
said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the
smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American
public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive
level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term
strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was
looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside
Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama
administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’
‘Our policy of arming the
opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’
the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not
be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory.
They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who
was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow
that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better”
issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a
direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’.
So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists
without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the
militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to
the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic
Sta
Germany, Israel and
Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some
influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence
would be shared. Each had its reasons for co-operating with Assad: Germany
feared what might happen among its own population of six million Muslims if
Islamic State expanded; Israel was concerned with border security; Russia had
an alliance of very long standing with Syria, and was worried by the threat to
its only naval base on the Mediterranean, at Tartus. ‘We weren’t intent on
deviating from Obama’s stated policies,’ the adviser said. ‘But sharing our
assessments via the military-to-military relationships with other countries
could prove productive. It was clear that Assad needed better tactical
intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were
met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama
didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and
that’s true of all presidents.’
Once the flow of US
intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information
about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army;
in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and
intentions. There was no direct contact between the US and the Syrian military;
instead, the adviser said, ‘we provided the information – including long-range
analyses on Syria’s future put together by contractors or one of our war
colleges – and these countries could do with it what they chose, including
sharing it with Assad. We were saying to the Germans and the others: “Here’s
some information that’s pretty interesting and our interest is mutual.” End of
conversation. The JCS could conclude that something beneficial would arise from
it – but it was a military to military thing, and not some sort of a sinister
Joint Chiefs’ plot to go around Obama and support Assad. It was a lot cleverer
than that. If Assad remains in power, it will not be because we did it. It’s
because he was smart enough to use the intelligence and sound tactical advice
we provided to others.’
*
The public history of
relations between the US and Syria over the past few decades has been one of
enmity. Assad condemned the 9/11 attacks, but opposed the Iraq War. George W.
Bush repeatedly linked Syria to the three members of his ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq,
Iran and North Korea – throughout his presidency. State Department cables made
public by WikiLeaks show that the Bush administration tried to destabilise
Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006,
William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an
analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods
‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He
recommended that Washington work with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to increase
sectarian tension and focus on publicising ‘Syrian efforts against extremist
groups’ – dissident Kurds and radical Sunni factions – ‘in a way that suggests
weakness, signs of instability, and uncontrolled blowback’; and that the
‘isolation of Syria’ should be encouraged through US support of the National
Salvation Front, led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president
whose government-in-exile in Riyadh was sponsored by the Saudis and the Muslim
Brotherhood. Another 2006 cable showed that the embassy had spent $5 million
financing dissidents who ran as independent candidates for the People’s
Assembly; the payments were kept up even after it became clear that Syrian
intelligence knew what was going on. A 2010 cable warned that funding for a
London-based television network run by a Syrian opposition group would be
viewed by the Syrian government ‘as a covert and hostile gesture toward the
regime’.
But there is also a
parallel history of shadowy co-operation between Syria and the US during the
same period. The two countries collaborated against al-Qaida, their common
enemy. A longtime consultant to America’s intelligence community said that,
after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view,
we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That
quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush
administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian
intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence
foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet
in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital
al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the
informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his
Syrian handlers. Assad also secretly turned over to the US relatives of Saddam
Hussein who had sought refuge in Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan,
Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists for the CIA in a
Damascus prison.
It was this history of
co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to
the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US. The Joint Chiefs
let it be known that in return the US would require four things: Assad must
restrain Hizbullah from attacking Israel; he must renew the stalled
negotiations with Israel to reach a settlement on the Golan Heights; he must
agree to accept Russian and other outside military advisers; and he must commit
to holding open elections after the war with a wide range of factions included.
‘We had positive feedback from the Israelis, who were willing to entertain the
idea, but they needed to know what the reaction would be from Iran and Syria,’
the JCS adviser told me. ‘The Syrians told us that Assad would not make a
decision unilaterally – he needed to have support from his military and Alawite
allies. Assad’s worry was that Israel would say yes and then not uphold its end
of the bargain.’ A senior adviser to the Kremlin on Middle East affairs told me
that in late 2012, after suffering a series of battlefield setbacks and
military defections, Assad had approached Israel via a contact in Moscow and
offered to reopen the talks on the Golan Heights. The Israelis had rejected the
offer. ‘They said, “Assad is finished,”’ the Russian official told me. ‘“He’s
close to the end.”’ He said the Turks had told Moscow the same thing. By
mid-2013, however, the Syrians believed the worst was behind them, and wanted
assurances that the Americans and others were serious about their offers of
help.
In the early stages of
the talks, the adviser said, the Joint Chiefs tried to establish what Assad
needed as a sign of their good intentions. The answer was sent through one of
Assad’s friends: ‘Bring him the head of Prince Bandar.’ The Joint Chiefs did
not oblige. Bandar bin Sultan had served Saudi Arabia for decades in
intelligence and national security affairs, and spent more than twenty years as
ambassador in Washington. In recent years, he has been known as an advocate for
Assad’s removal from office by any means. Reportedly in poor health, he
resigned last year as director of the Saudi National Security Council, but
Saudi Arabia continues to be a major provider of funds to the Syrian
opposition, estimated by US intelligence last year at $700 million.
In July 2013, the Joint
Chiefs found a more direct way of demonstrating to Assad how serious they were
about helping him. By then the CIA-sponsored secret flow of arms from Libya to
the Syrian opposition, via Turkey, had been underway for more than a year (it started
sometime after Gaddafi’s death on 20 October 2011).＊ The operation was largely run out of a covert
CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence. On 11 September 2012
the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed during an
anti-American demonstration that led to the burning down of the US consulate in
Benghazi; reporters for the Washington Post found
copies of the ambassador’s schedule in the building’s ruins. It showed that on
10 September Stevens had met with the chief of the CIA’s annex operation. The
next day, shortly before he died, he met a representative from Al-Marfa
Shipping and Maritime Services, a Tripoli-based company which, the JCS adviser
said, was known by the Joint Staff to be handling the weapons shipments.
By the late summer of
2013, the DIA’s assessment had been circulated widely, but although many in the
American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was
dominated by extremists the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming, presenting a
continuing problem for Assad’s army. Gaddafi’s stockpile had created an
international arms bazaar, though prices were high. ‘There was no way to stop
the arms shipments that had been authorised by the president,’ the JCS adviser
said. ‘The solution involved an appeal to the pocketbook. The CIA was
approached by a representative from the Joint Chiefs with a suggestion: there
were far less costly weapons available in Turkish arsenals that could reach the
Syrian rebels within days, and without a boat ride.’ But it wasn’t only the CIA
that benefited. ‘We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to
Erdoğan,’ the adviser said, ‘and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all
the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been
seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could
understand: “We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its
tracks.”’
The flow of US
intelligence to the Syrian army, and the downgrading of the quality of the arms
being supplied to the rebels, came at a critical juncture. The Syrian army had
suffered heavy losses in the spring of 2013 in fighting against Jabhat al-Nusra
and other extremist groups as it failed to hold the provincial capital of
Raqqa. Sporadic Syrian army and air-force raids continued in the area for
months, with little success, until it was decided to withdraw from Raqqa and
other hard to defend, lightly populated areas in the north and west and focus
instead on consolidating the government’s hold on Damascus and the heavily
populated areas linking the capital to Latakia in the north-east. But as the
army gained in strength with the Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
Turkey escalated their financing and arming of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic
State, which by the end of 2013 had made enormous gains on both sides of the
Syria/Iraq border. The remaining non-fundamentalist rebels found themselves
fighting – and losing – pitched battles against the extremists. In January
2014, IS took complete control of Raqqa and the tribal areas around it from
al-Nusra and established the city as its base. Assad still controlled 80 per
cent of the Syrian population, but he had lost a vast amount of territory.
CIA efforts to train the
moderate rebel forces were also failing badly. ‘The CIA’s training camp was in
Jordan and was controlled by a Syrian tribal group,’ the JCS adviser said.
There was a suspicion that some of those who signed up for training were
actually Syrian army regulars minus their uniforms. This had happened before,
at the height of the Iraqi war, when hundreds of Shia militia members showed up
at American training camps for new uniforms, weapons and a few days of
training, and then disappeared into the desert. A separate training programme,
set up by the Pentagon in Turkey, fared no better. The Pentagon acknowledged in
September that only ‘four or five’ of its recruits were still battling Islamic
State; a few days later 70 of them defected to Jabhat al-Nusra immediately
after crossing the border into Syria.
In January 2014,
despairing at the lack of progress, John Brennan, the director of the CIA,
summoned American and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the Middle
East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the aim of persuading Saudi Arabia
to stop supporting extremist fighters in Syria. ‘The Saudis told us they were
happy to listen,’ the JCS adviser said, ‘so everyone sat around in Washington
to hear Brennan tell them that they had to get on board with the so-called
moderates. His message was that if everyone in the region stopped supporting
al-Nusra and Isis their ammunition and weapons would dry up, and the moderates
would win out.’ Brennan’s message was ignored by the Saudis, the adviser said,
who ‘went back home and increased their efforts with the extremists and asked
us for more technical support. And we say OK, and so it turns out that we end
up reinforcing the extremists.’
But the Saudis were far
from the only problem: American intelligence had accumulated intercept and
human intelligence demonstrating that the Erdoğan government had been
supporting Jabhat al-Nusra for years, and was now doing the same for Islamic
State. ‘We can handle the Saudis,’ the adviser said. ‘We can handle the Muslim
Brotherhood. You can argue that the whole balance in the Middle East is based
on a form of mutually assured destruction between Israel and the rest of the
Middle East, and Turkey can disrupt the balance – which is Erdoğan’s dream. We
told him we wanted him to shut down the pipeline of foreign jihadists flowing
into Turkey. But he is dreaming big – of restoring the Ottoman Empire – and he
did not realise the extent to which he could be successful in this.’
*
One of
the constants in US affairs since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a
military-to-military relationship with Russia. After 1991 the US spent billions
of dollars to help Russia secure its nuclear weapons complex, including a
highly secret joint operation to remove weapons-grade uranium from unsecured
storage depots in Kazakhstan. Joint programmes to monitor the security of
weapons-grade materials continued for the next two decades. During the American
war on Afghanistan, Russia provided overflight rights for US cargo carriers and
tankers, as well as access for the flow of weapons, ammunition, food and water
the US war machine needed daily. Russia’s military provided intelligence on
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts and helped the US negotiate rights to use an
airbase in Kyrgyzstan. The Joint Chiefs have been in communication with their
Russian counterparts throughout the Syrian war, and the ties between the two militaries
start at the top. In August, a few weeks before his retirement as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, Dempsey made a farewell visit to the headquarters of the
Irish Defence Forces in Dublin and told his audience there that he had made a
point while in office to keep in touch with the chief of the Russian General
Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. ‘I’ve actually suggested to him that we not
end our careers as we began them,’ Dempsey said – one a tank commander in West
Germany, the other in the east.
When it comes to tackling
Islamic State, Russia and the US have much to offer each other. Many in the IS
leadership and rank and file fought for more than a decade against Russia in
the two Chechen wars that began in 1994, and the Putin government is heavily invested
in combating Islamist terrorism. ‘Russia knows the Isis leadership,’ the JCS
adviser said, ‘and has insights into its operational techniques, and has much
intelligence to share.’ In return, he said, ‘we’ve got excellent trainers with
years of experience in training foreign fighters – experience that Russia does
not have.’ The adviser would not discuss what American intelligence is also
believed to have: an ability to obtain targeting data, often by paying huge
sums of cash, from sources within rebel militias.
A former White House
adviser on Russian affairs told me that before 9/11 Putin ‘used to say to us:
“We have the same nightmares about different places.” He was referring to his
problems with the caliphate in Chechnya and our early issues with al-Qaida.
These days, after the Metrojet bombing over Sinai and the massacres in Paris
and elsewhere, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we actually have the same
nightmares about the same places.’
Yet the Obama
administration continues to condemn Russia for its support of Assad. A retired
senior diplomat who served at the US embassy in Moscow expressed sympathy for
Obama’s dilemma as the leader of the Western coalition opposed to Russia’s
aggression against Ukraine: ‘Ukraine is a serious issue and Obama has been
handling it firmly with sanctions. But our policy vis-à-vis Russia is too often
unfocused. But it’s not about us in Syria. It’s about making sure Bashar does
not lose. The reality is that Putin does not want to see the chaos in Syria
spread to Jordan or Lebanon, as it has to Iraq, and he does not want to see
Syria end up in the hands of Isis. The most counterproductive thing Obama has
done, and it has hurt our efforts to end the fighting a lot, was to say: “Assad
must go as a premise for negotiation.”’ He also echoed a view held by some in
the Pentagon when he alluded to a collateral factor behind Russia’s decision to
launch airstrikes in support of the Syrian army on 30 September: Putin’s desire
to prevent Assad from suffering the same fate as Gaddafi. He had been told that
Putin had watched a video of Gaddafi’s savage death three times, a video that
shows him being sodomised with a bayonet. The JCS adviser also told me of a US
intelligence assessment which concluded that Putin had been appalled by Gaddafi’s
fate: ‘Putin blamed himself for letting Gaddafi go, for not playing a strong
role behind the scenes’ at the UN when the Western coalition was lobbying to be
allowed to undertake the airstrikes that destroyed the regime. ‘Putin believed
that unless he got engaged Bashar would suffer the same fate – mutilated – and
he’d see the destruction of his allies in Syria.’
In a speech on 22
November, Obama declared that the ‘principal targets’ of the Russian airstrikes
‘have been the moderate opposition’. It’s a line that the administration –
along with most of the mainstream American media – has rarely strayed from. The
Russians insist that they are targeting all rebel groups that threaten Syria’s
stability – including Islamic State. The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East
explained in an interview that the first round of Russian airstrikes was aimed
at bolstering security around a Russian airbase in Latakia, an Alawite
stronghold. The strategic goal, he said, has been to establish a jihadist-free
corridor from Damascus to Latakia and the Russian naval base at Tartus and then
to shift the focus of bombing gradually to the south and east, with a greater
concentration of bombing missions over IS-held territory. Russian strikes on IS
targets in and near Raqqa were reported as early as the beginning of October;
in November there were further strikes on IS positions near the historic city
of Palmyra and in Idlib province, a bitterly contested stronghold on the
Turkish border.
Russian incursions into
Turkish airspace began soon after Putin authorised the bombings, and the
Russian air force deployed electronic jamming systems that interfered with
Turkish radar. The message being sent to the Turkish air force, the JCS adviser
said, was: ‘We’re going to fly our fighter planes where we want and when we
want and jam your radar. Do not fuck with us. Putin was letting the Turks know
what they were up against.’ Russia’s aggression led to Turkish complaints and
Russian denials, along with more aggressive border patrolling by the Turkish
air force. There were no significant incidents until 24 November, when two
Turkish F-16 fighters, apparently acting under more aggressive rules of
engagement, shot down a Russian Su-24M jet that had crossed into Turkish
airspace for no more than 17 seconds. In the days after the fighter was shot
down, Obama expressed support for Erdoğan, and after they met in private on 1
December he told a press conference that his administration remained ‘very much
committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty’. He said that as long as
Russia remained allied with Assad, ‘a lot of Russian resources are still going
to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we
should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil
targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be
happening in the next several weeks.’
The Kremlin adviser on
the Middle East, like the Joint Chiefs and the DIA, dismisses the ‘moderates’
who have Obama’s support, seeing them as extremist Islamist groups that fight
alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and IS (‘There’s no need to play with words and split
terrorists into moderate and not moderate,’ Putin said in a speech on 22
October). The American generals see them as exhausted militias that have been
forced to make an accommodation with Jabhat al-Nusra or IS in order to survive.
At the end of 2014, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist who was allowed to
spend ten days touring IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, told CNN that the
IS leadership ‘are all laughing about the Free Syrian Army. They don’t take
them for serious. They say: “The best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they
get a good weapon, they sell it to us.” They didn’t take them for serious. They
take for serious Assad. They take for serious, of course, the bombs. But they
fear nothing, and FSA doesn’t play a role.’
*
Putin’s bombing
campaign provoked a series of anti-Russia articles in the American press. On 25
October, the New York Times reported, citing
Obama administration officials, that Russian submarines and spy ships were
‘aggressively’ operating near the undersea cables that carry much of the
world’s internet traffic – although, as the article went on to acknowledge,
there was ‘no evidence yet’ of any Russian attempt actually to interfere with
that traffic. Ten days earlier the Times published
a summary of Russian intrusions into its former Soviet satellite republics, and
described the Russian bombing in Syria as being ‘in some respects a return to
the ambitious military moves of the Soviet past’. The report did not note that
the Assad administration had invited Russia to intervene, nor did it mention
the US bombing raids inside Syria that had been underway since the previous
September, without Syria’s approval. An October op-ed in the same paper by
Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, declared
that the Russian air campaign was attacking ‘everyone except the Islamic
State’. The anti-Russia stories did not abate after the Metrojet disaster, for
which Islamic State claimed credit. Few in the US government and media
questioned why IS would target a Russian airliner, along with its 224
passengers and crew, if Moscow’s air force was attacking only the Syrian
‘moderates’.
Economic sanctions,
meanwhile, are still in effect against Russia for what a large number of
Americans consider Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine, as are US Treasury Department
sanctions against Syria and against those Americans who do business there. The New
York Times, in a report on sanctions in late November, revived an old and
groundless assertion, saying that the Treasury’s actions ‘emphasise an argument
that the administration has increasingly been making about Mr Assad as it seeks
to press Russia to abandon its backing for him: that although he professes to
be at war with Islamist terrorists, he has a symbiotic relationship with the
Islamic State that has allowed it to thrive while he has clung to power.’
*
The four
core elements of Obama’s Syria policy remain intact today: an insistence that
Assad must go; that no anti-IS coalition with Russia is possible; that Turkey
is a steadfast ally in the war against terrorism; and that there really are
significant moderate opposition forces for the US to support. The Paris attacks
on 13 November that killed 130 people did not change the White House’s public
stance, although many European leaders, including François Hollande, advocated
greater co-operation with Russia and agreed to co-ordinate more closely with
its air force; there was also talk of the need to be more flexible about the
timing of Assad’s exit from power. On 24 November, Hollande flew to Washington
to discuss how France and the US could collaborate more closely in the fight
against Islamic State. At a joint press conference at the White House, Obama
said he and Hollande had agreed that ‘Russia’s strikes against the moderate
opposition only bolster the Assad regime, whose brutality has helped to fuel
the rise’ of IS. Hollande didn’t go that far but he said that the diplomatic
process in Vienna would ‘lead to Bashar al-Assad’s departure … a government of
unity is required.’ The press conference failed to deal with the far more
urgent impasse between the two men on the matter of Erdoğan. Obama defended
Turkey’s right to defend its borders; Hollande said it was ‘a matter of
urgency’ for Turkey to take action against terrorists. The JCS adviser told me
that one of Hollande’s main goals in flying to Washington had been to try to
persuade Obama to join the EU in a mutual declaration of war against Islamic
State. Obama said no. The Europeans had pointedly not gone to Nato, to which
Turkey belongs, for such a declaration. ‘Turkey is the problem,’ the JCS
adviser said.
Assad, naturally, doesn’t
accept that a group of foreign leaders should be deciding on his future. Imad
Moustapha, now Syria’s ambassador to China, was dean of the IT faculty at the
University of Damascus, and a close aide of Assad’s, when he was appointed in
2004 as the Syrian ambassador to the US, a post he held for seven years.
Moustapha is known still to be close to Assad, and can be trusted to reflect
what he thinks. He told me that for Assad to surrender power would mean
capitulating to ‘armed terrorist groups’ and that ministers in a national unity
government – such as was being proposed by the Europeans – would be seen to be
beholden to the foreign powers that appointed them. These powers could remind
the new president ‘that they could easily replace him as they did before to the
predecessor … Assad owes it to his people: he could not leave because the
historic enemies of Syria are demanding his departure.’
*
Moustapha also
brought up China, an ally of Assad that has allegedly committed more than $30
billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria. China, too, is worried about Islamic
State. ‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said:
international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the
activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west.
Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a
funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters
now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement –
an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist
Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish
intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous
amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha
said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur
fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in
Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with
information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on
travelling into Syria.’
Moustapha’s concerns were
echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst who has closely followed the
passage of jihadists through Turkey and into Syria. The analyst, whose views
are routinely sought by senior government officials, told me that ‘Erdoğan has
been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has
been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim
terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then
flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.’ He added that there was also what
amounted to another ‘rat line’ that was funnelling Uighurs – estimates range
from a few hundred to many thousands over the years – from China into
Kazakhstan for eventual relay to Turkey, and then to IS territory in Syria. ‘US
intelligence,’ he said, ‘is not getting good information about these activities
because those insiders who are unhappy with the policy are not talking to
them.’ He also said it was ‘not clear’ that the officials responsible for
Syrian policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’. IHS-Jane’s
Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as
five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with
perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has information that
‘up to 860 Uighur fighters are currently in Syria.’
China’s growing concern
about the Uighur problem and its link to Syria and Islamic State have
preoccupied Christina Lin, a scholar who dealt with Chinese issues a decade ago
while serving in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. ‘I grew up in Taiwan and
came to the Pentagon as a critic of China,’ Lin told me. ‘I used to demonise
the Chinese as ideologues, and they are not perfect. But over the years as I
see them opening up and evolving, I have begun to change my perspective. I see
China as a potential partner for various global challenges especially in the
Middle East. There are many places – Syria for one – where the United States
and China must co-operate in regional security and counterterrorism.’ A few
weeks earlier, she said, China and India, Cold War enemies that ‘hated each
other more than China and the United States hated each other, conducted a
series of joint counterterrorism exercises. And today China and Russia both
want to co-operate on terrorism issues with the United States.’ As China sees
it, Lin suggests, Uighur militants who have made their way to Syria are being
trained by Islamic State in survival techniques intended to aid them on covert
return trips to the Chinese mainland, for future terrorist attacks there. ‘If
Assad fails,’ Lin wrote in a paper published in September, ‘jihadi fighters
from Russia’s Chechnya, China’s Xinjiang and India’s Kashmir will then turn
their eyes towards the home front to continue jihad, supported by a new and
well-sourced Syrian operating base in the heart of the Middle East.’
*
General Dempsey and
his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of
bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not.
‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth
about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a
decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He
thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’
Flynn told me his problems went beyond Syria. ‘I was shaking things up at the
DIA – and not just moving deckchairs on theTitanic. It
was radical reform. I felt that the civilian leadership did not want to hear
the truth. I suffered for it, but I’m OK with that.’ In a recent interview in Der
Spiegel, Flynn was blunt about Russia’s entry into the Syrian war: ‘We
have to work constructively with Russia. Whether we like it or not, Russia made
a decision to be there and to act militarily. They are there, and this has
dramatically changed the dynamic. So you can’t say Russia is bad; they have to
go home. It’s not going to happen. Get real.’
Few in the US Congress
share this view. One exception is Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and
member of the House Armed Services Committee who, as a major in the Army
National Guard, served two tours in the Middle East. In an interview on CNN in
October she said: ‘The US and the CIA should stop this illegal and
counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad and should
stay focused on fighting against … the Islamic extremist groups.’
‘Does it not concern
you,’ the interviewer asked, ‘that Assad’s regime has been brutal, killing at
least 200,000 and maybe 300,000 of his own people?’
‘The things that are
being said about Assad right now,’ Gabbard responded, ‘are the same that were
said about Gaddafi, they are the same things that were said about Saddam
Hussein by those who were advocating for the US to … overthrow those regimes …
If it happens here in Syria … we will end up in a situation with far greater
suffering, with far greater persecution of religious minorities and Christians
in Syria, and our enemy will be far stronger.’
‘So what you are saying,’
the interviewer asked, ‘is that the Russian military involvement in the air and
on-the-ground Iranian involvement – they are actually doing the US a favour?’
‘They are working toward
defeating our common enemy,’ Gabbard replied.
Gabbard later told me
that many of her colleagues in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, have
thanked her privately for speaking out. ‘There are a lot of people in the
general public, and even in the Congress, who need to have things clearly
explained to them,’ Gabbard said. ‘But it’s hard when there’s so much deception
about what is going on. The truth is not out.’ It’s unusual for a politician to
challenge her party’s foreign policy directly and on the record. For someone on
the inside, with access to the most secret intelligence, speaking openly and
critically can be a career-ender. Informed dissent can be transmitted by means
of a trust relationship between a reporter and those on the inside, but it
almost invariably includes no signature. The dissent exists, however. The
longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his
contempt when I asked him for his view of the US’s Syria policy. ‘The solution
in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and
all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together. Bashar
will remain in office and, after the country is stabilised there will be an
election. There is no other option.’
The military’s indirect
pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September. His
replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified
before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July, two months before assuming
office. ‘If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential
threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,’ Dunford said. ‘If
you look at their behaviour, it’s nothing short of alarming.’ In October, as
chairman, Dunford dismissed the Russian bombing efforts in Syria, telling the
same committee that Russia ‘is not fighting’ IS. He added that America must
‘work with Turkish partners to secure the northern border of Syria’ and ‘do all
we can to enable vetted Syrian opposition forces’ – i.e. the ‘moderates’ – to
fight the extremists.
Obama now has a more
compliant Pentagon. There will be no more indirect challenges from the military
leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan. Dempsey
and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of
Erdoğan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him –
and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case. ‘We know what
you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,’ the president told Erdoğan’s
intelligence chief at a tense meeting at the White House (as I reported in the LRB of
17 April 2014). The Joint Chiefs and the DIA were constantly telling
Washington’s leadership of the jihadist threat in Syria, and of Turkey’s
support for it. The message was never listened to. Why not?
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